Lloyd
Fernando was born to a Sinhalese family
in Sri Lanka in 1926. In
1938, his family migrated to Singapore.
Mr. Fernando was educated at St Patrick’s in Singapore, with the Japanese
occupation interrupting that education from 1943 to 1945. During the Japanese
attack on Singapore, Mr. Fernando’s father was killed. During the Japanese
occupation, Fernando worked in a variety of manual labor jobs.
Lloyd
Fernando thereafter graduated from the University of Malaya in Singapore, and
subsequently served as an instructor at the Singapore Polytechnic. Lloyd
Fernando became an assistant lecturer at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur in 1960. Mr. Fernando was
awarded a scholarship at Leeds University,
UK where he received his PhD.
In 1967
Fernando was appointed to serve as a professor at the English Department of the
University of Malaya, where he served until his retirement in 1978. Subsequently,
Mr. Fernando studied law at City
University in the United Kingdom and then at Middle Temple,
returning to Malaysia with two law degrees, whereupon he was employed by a law
firm, and thereafter started a separate law practice business. In 1997, Mr.
Fernando had a stroke and ceased his professional activities
Literary
work
·
Scorpion orchid, 1976
·
Cultures
in Conflict, 1986
·
Green is the color, 1993
·
Twenty-two
Malaysian Stories: an anthology of writing of writing in English (editor)
·
“New Women" in the
Late Victorian Novel, 1977
It is a novel by Llyod Fernando, first published by
Heinemann Educational Books(Asia) in 1976. The novel is set in Singapore in the
1950s.
•Set in 1950’s Singapore – a time of racial tension and nationalistic uprising
•Theme of national birth and the anxieties present regarding racial conflict and ethnic self interest
SYNOPSIS
An exciting first novel set in pre-independence Singapore. Scorpion Orchid follows the lives of four young men—a Malay, an Eurasian, a Chinese and a Tamil—against a backdrop of racial violence and political factions struggling for dominance. Excerpts from classical Malay and colonial English sources appear throughout the narrative, illuminating the roots and significance of this period in history.
THE TEXT AS METAPHOR
•Text is a metaphor for growth of a new nation
•The four young men gain a new awareness of their ethnic identities as the
negotiate the race riots that destroy their complacent sense of camaraderie
•The new awareness is central to their transition from adolescence to adult
life •Represents the Malayan society and the transition between former
tolerance and present assertiveness•Scorpion Orchid generally preserves an allegorical distance between the personal and the political. • The personal and the political develop along parallel lines and mirror one another, and when they do intersect they remain clearly defined
CHARACTERS
•Santi, a Tamil Indian, Sabran, a Malay, Guan Kheng, a Chinese, and Peter, a Eurasian.
•Santinathan – Indian, refuses to observe conventions of university life, gets expelled – ends up as village schoolteacher
•Sabran – Malay, involved in politics, gets arrested and his future prospects somewhat set back considerably •Sabran reflects on his family in the kampung (village) that has sacrificed for his education and which exerts a strong emotional pull on him, but is in no position to offer him either comfort or advice.
•Guan Kheng – Chinese, comes from wealthy family, feels betrayed by the Malays who suddenly consider him a foreigner. Peter D’Almeida – Eurasian, confused about his identity, loses faith in ‘new’ Singapore, emigrates to England after he is beaten up in a riot (comes back at the end)
•Sally – uncertain ethnic background and origin, works at a hawker stall, part time prostitute, has an ambiguous relationship with all four men involving sex, money and love, although they pay her for sex she is treated as a friend.
SUMMARY
OF GREEN IS THE COLOR
Lloyd
Fernando's Green is the Color is a very interesting novel. The country
is still scarred by violence, vigilante groups roam the countryside, religious
extremists set up camp in the hinterland, there are still sporadic outbreaks
of fighting in the city, and everyone, all the time, is conscious of
being watched. It comes as some surprise to find that the story is actually a contemporary
reworking of a an episode from the Misa Melayu, an 18th century classic written
by Raja Chulan. In this climate of unease, Fernando employs a multi-racial cast
of characters.
At the centre of the novel there's a core of
four main characters, good (if idealistic)young people who cross the racial
divide to become friends, and even fall in love. There's Dahlan, a young
lawyer and activist who invites trouble by making impassioned speech
on the subject of religious intolerance on the steps of a Malacca church; his
friend from university days, Yun Ming, a civil servant working for the
Ministry of Unity who seeks justice by working from within the government. The
most fully realized character of the novel is Siti Sara, and much of the story
is told from her viewpoint. A sociologist and academic, she's newly returned from
studies in America where she found life much more straightforward, and trapped
in a loveless marriage to Omar, a young man much influenced by the Iranian
revolution who seeks purification by joining religious commune.
The hungry
passion between Yun Ming and Siti - almost bordering on violence at times and
breaking both social and religious taboos - is very well depicted. Like the
others, Sara is struggling to make sense of events :Nobody could get may
sixty-nine right, she thought. It was hopeless to pretend you could be
objective about it. speaking even to someone close to you, you were
careful for fear the person might unwittingly quote you to others. if a third
person was present, it was worse, you spoke for the other person's benefit. If hews
Malay you spoke one way, Chinese another, Indian another. even if he wasn’t
listening. in the end the spun tissue, like an unsightly scab, became your
vision of what happened; the wound beneath continued to run pus. Although
the novel is narrated from a third person viewpoint, it is curious
that just one chapter is narrated by Sara's father, one of the minor
characters, an elderly village imam and a man of great compassion and insight.